Why There Is No Such Thing as 'Proper English'

Pikoro writes: A recent article in the Wall Street Journal explains why the concept of a "proper" English isn't realistic. Quoting: "It's a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers can't express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. ... As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. ... We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because it’s how we see and hear people use the language. ... That’s how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is “correct” usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct. The grammatical rules invoked by pedants aren’t real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions.

Comments

There might not be Proper English

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's damn certain there is Improper English.

Re:There might not be Proper English

[The Rizz]

I would agree. And I think the notion of teaching "Proper English" is less about saying common usage is wrong than it is with trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects. If you can teach one set of rules for the language as being "correct" and make sure everyone understands it that way, then at least you have a common starting point for all the different dialects, and hopefully keep people ostensibly speaking the same language actually able to understand each other.

Re:There might not be Proper English

[ShanghaiBill]

trying to slow down the fragmentation of the language into dialects.

English is not fragmenting. It is coalescing into a single global language. A century ago, English spoken in widely separated areas, like say Australia and America, were much further apart than they are today. In the past, even different regions of America, like say New England and the Deep South, sometimes had difficulty communicating. Today, regional accents are slowly dying out, and vocabulary is standardizing. Part of the reason is easy air travel, but bigger reasons are the globalization of media and entertainment, and the Internet.

Re:There might not be Proper English

[shilly]

You mean "distinct", not "disparate".

While the British Isles has many forms of English, and a number of dialects, regional variations are mainly confined to accents and some vocabulary. There is no mutual incomprehensibility between a Mancunian and a Kentish resident, even if there's the odd word or phrase used by the one and not the other. This is also true for Scottish English, which is very definitely not typically "hard to understand as even being English". Cockney slang as slang is barely used by anyone any more, while more generally Cockney English has, of course, more or less been replaced by Estuary English, which is spoken by people all across the South East. In the East End, English is most likely to be difficult to understand for people who only speak Standard British English because of imported words and features from new immigrant communities such as Sylhetis and Lithuanians.

Regional variations continue to exist in British English, and will continue to be generated, but it is undoubtedly true that the extent of variation has lessened compared to 50 years ago, and that this is partly driven by migration and partly by media.

It sounds to me, as a Brit, as though you're simply subscribing to a popular US view of how Britain's language works from several thousand miles away; a view which is inaccurate.

The whole premise is an excuse for illiteracy

[msobkow]

The whole premise of the article is a pandering to the youth with an excuse for their illiterate and malformed excuses for use of the language. As per usual, "you don't get it, grandpa" is presented as a valid excuse for a lack of education and for football players in university who can't write a simple one page essay that can even garner a 50% grade.

Understanding rules looser than style guide rules

[tepples]

The rules sufficient for successful understanding are looser than the rules prescribed by style guides. Still, following the rules in a major style guide will help you stay well within the rules for understanding.

Re:A Language With No Rules...

[Rei]

Ah, the old "American English is a corruption of good pure British English" attitude. Sorry, but both languages have been devolving from their divergence point, neither is more pure than the other. For example, British English is non-rhotic (r-dropping), while except in a few regional accents (ex: Boston), American English isn't. 17th century English was rhotic, like American English; people weren't going around saying "hard" and "yard" as "haad" and "yaad". American English retains secondary stresses more, for example "secretary" and "dictionary" rather than "secretr'y" and "dictionr'y". American English also has little T-glottalization, like 17th century English, while modern British English does it heavily (ex: "city" as "ci-ey"). The more cockney you sound, the less you sound like a 17th century English speaker. As for vowels, American English wins some of those comparisons and loses others - but for example the american A in words like "cat" and "path" is historic, unlike the British pronunciations which match the a in "father" (of course, if you want to go even further on accuracy, Scottish English retains the historic vowel pronunciation better than both British and American English - something I think most Brits would be loathe to admit. ;) )

Langauge shifts usually happen faster in urban environments than rural ones. Here in Iceland, for example, one sees the same thing with the countryside accents much closer to historical accents than that of the Reykjavík metro area. Throughout much of its history, the US was a sparsely populated agricultural country, while the UK was industrialized and urban. In fact, one word that is still used commonly used in British english - "reckon" - is largely looked down on as hick talk in the US, in that its use has significantly declined from its historic commonness in American urban environments in the past century but has been retained in rural ones. Counterbalancing the historic rural nature of the US was the significant need for new words, having been thrust into a very different environment. Both sides of the pond met with heavy interaction with people speaking foreign languages and adopted words from them, although the levels of exposure to each language and words borrowed were different.

Anyway, if you're curious, one can find a number of other evolutions from 17th century English here, both on the American and British sides.